Saturday 5 October 2013 04.30 EDT
First published on Saturday 5 October 2013 04.30 EDT

"You have great gifts to give this crazy country," Kurt Vonnegut wrote to Sergei Dovlatov. "We are lucky to have you here." Dovlatov had arrived in America in 1979, after emigrating from the Soviet Union, and his stories began to appear in the New Yorker the following year. Vonnegut called them "truly deep and universal".

Dovlatov wrote some of the best Russian novels of the late 20th century. He is hugely popular in Russia, where he was unpublished in his lifetime, but among Anglophone readers he has been inexplicably forgotten. There have been a couple of revamped editions, but no new translations have appeared since shortly after his death in 1990. It is high time for a revival. Dovlatov's themes are topical; his writing is witty, dry and economical.

Pushkin Hills, one of his most popular novels, has never been published before in English; Alma Classics have been searching for a suitable translator for years. Now the writer's daughter, Katherine Dovlatov, has captured her father's style. She describes the novel as "the most personal of all my father's works" and only took on the task of translating it after the publishers rejected a previous translation and numerous samples. This year is the 30th anniversary of its original publication in New York.

From the opening page, Pushkin Hills is a delight. Dovlatov's ironic tone suits his rural comedy ("From Leningrad." "Ah, yeah, I heard of it …"), philosophical observations and quirky asides, such as the tendency to emphasise one large feature in famous people: Marx's beard, Lenin's forehead or Pushkin's sideburns.

"What's your pleasure?" a waiter asks. "'My pleasure,' I said, 'is for everyone to be kind, humble and courteous.'" The narrator, Boris Alikhanov, an alcoholic, unpublished author, is on his way to work as a guide at the old family estate of the poet Alexander Pushkin. The waiter, "having had his fill of life's diversity", says nothing in response, leaving Boris to order vodka, beer and sausage sandwiches.

Boris describes himself as "an almost dissident"; he fits in neither with his reverential fellow-guides nor with Tanya, his pragmatic wife, who is planning to emigrate. In some ways, Dovlatov's drunken narrator is a classic example of that distinctly un-Soviet figure, the "superfluous man", popularised by Turgenev and Lermontov.

The setting and many of the details are autobiographical. The writer himself worked as a summer guide in and around Mikhailovskoe, south of Pskov. The area is one of Russia's zapovedniki (reserves); the novel's original title, Zapovednik, has been made more specific in English as Pushkin Hills, but loses the slightly menacing feel it shared with The Zone, Dovlatov's account of life as a prison guard.

The alternative sense of zapovednik (a wildlife preserve, as well as a museum-estate) hints at the idea of a human zoo. Both the prison and the reserve reflect in miniature the broader insanity of Soviet life. In The Zone, Dovlatov included metafictional letters to his publisher, containing meditations on literature or the nature of evil; similarly, through the earthy dialogues and bittersweet memories of Pushkin Hills he reflects on love, loss and creativity.

Dovlatov was born in 1941 and grew up in Leningrad; his mother was an Armenian actor-turned-proofreader and his father a Jewish theatre director. The Journalists' Union expelled him for publishing stories abroad and the KGB destroyed the letterpresses for his first book. He left the Soviet Union in 1978 and, in the subsequent decade became, after Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky, the most famous contemporary Russian writer in the US.

His émigré identity is crucial to Dovlatov's work, whether he's rummaging through an old suitcase for poignant anecdotes, recalling Soviet journalism in The Compromise or writing about New York Russians in A Foreign Woman. But he avoids sentimentality and derides Soviet authors who hanker after embroidered towels and samovars. Boris, considering emigration in Pushkin Hills, says he would miss "my language, my people, my crazy country", but he "couldn't care less about birch trees".

Underneath the jokes are serious debates about writing, censorship and exile. "My readers are here," says Boris. "Who needs my stories in Chicago?" He compares himself with Pushkin, who also had "an uneasy relationship with the government" and trouble with his wife. A feeling for other (often persecuted) Russian authors pervades Dovlatov's work: "First they drive the man into the ground and then begin looking for his personal effects. That's how it was with Dostoevsky, that's how it was with Yesenin, and that's how it'll be with Pasternak."

Dovlatov himself fits this pattern: censored, read in samizdat and celebrated only posthumously in Russia. There were plans recently to convert the log cabin where he lived in Pushkin Hills into a museum. (He describes this cabin in the novel, with its holes in the roof and gaps between floorboards where stray dogs got in.) Dovlatov's ultimate subject matter is the difficult human journey: "The only honest path is the path of mistakes, disappointments and hopes," he writes. "Life is the discovery of the boundaries of good and evil through personal experience. There is no other way."